So much for our ABC, say hello to instability

And then there's mysteries in the neighborhood. One of them is our next-door neighbors. Not the ones who've gotten a dog and left it on ``yap''. The ones on the other side. It was a guy and his mother, who'd moved back to Michigan so he could take better care of her. We were on decent albeit not warm terms with them, with no real points of contention once they got to taking their dogs in after a reasonable time of barking at nothing in the yard, mornings and evenings.

As the tenses involved suggest, they're not our neighbors anymore. They just vanished one day. We weren't even sure when, although in hindsight we realize that what had looked like a massive proper spring cleaning, including throwing out an old mattress, was the leaving-the-house cleanout. But that didn't stand out at the time. We only realized on noticing something was wrong, and realizing that it was the absence of the very slight chain-link fence they'd put up to keep the dogs in the yard.

So we're mostly regretful about this. They'd been pretty decent neighbors, with the only hassle being that they didn't do anything about the poison ivy growing in the stretch of the backyard they'd let go feral. Also they had connected their fence to a somewhat shabby wooden fence of ours that we'd meant to take down, and that we couldn't without coordinating some dog control with them. We've got the chance to remove our needing-replacement fence now and should as soon as we have a cool enough day for it. And we can get access to parts of their yard that'll make it easier to clean stuff in ours, including perhaps a fresh poison ivy removal expedition. This stuff should be the neighbor's landlord's responsibility, but ``should'' and ``are'' are different things, especially if we want the poison ivy contained.

And besides losing people we got along with well enough to smile and wave on seeing them, there's the dread: what if someone worse moves in? Since I married into the state there've been basically good neighbors in that house, but before that time there was a horrible neighbor who'd been no end of crises for bunny_hugger and, far enough back, her starter husband.

When they moved out they left all their trash and recycling bins on the extension. It wasn't a recycling night. We moved the (emptied) trash bin in back of their house, and moved the recycling bin back until the proper week, then tucked the emptied bin in back of the house again. No reason to be unfriendly to whoever the next tenants are, whenever they are.

Trivia: In the Moroccan crisis of 1911 the German gunboat Panther was despatched to the port of Agadir to rescue any endangered Germans. Also the nearest German to Agadir, a man in Mogador, was found and ordered by his government to get to Agadir so he might be rescued. He spotted the Panther the 4th of July, 1911, and was recovered by it the 5th.
Source: The Struggle For Mastery In Europe, 1848 - 1918, A J P Taylor.

Currently Reading: Storm In A Teacup: The Physics Of Everyday Life, Helen Czerski.